First and foremost, there are some electrical tests going on this week at the lab, which probably won't affect us and probably won't cause power surges, but there might be minute-long blips. Given that and the funky wiring in this building which has always been full of gremlins we're not taking any chances. We'll take everything off line once the usual outage tasks are over on Tuesday afternoon, then coming back up Wednesday morning. Roughly 4pm to 10am, Pacific Time. Sorry for an inconvenience.

Good news: With the questionable UPS out of the loop, synergy didn't reboot itself on the two-week mark. So we're fairly certain those reboots were not due to any problem with synergy.

We're still having science database resource issues. Pretty much when the backend science stuff runs (ntpckr and rfi) the science database throughput nosedives due to all the random i/o, which in turn causes the assimilators to slow down and that queue to back up. This morning I put some logic into my network/project monitoring code that when the assimilator queue hits a high water mark, shut off the ntpckrs and rfis.

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

However, it does provide an ideal opportunity to swap-out those UPS batteries that have been forgotten for a few years. And, if they haven't been forgotten, then leave things running for a while to deep-cycle discharge them.

The really bad thing is that lab-wide outages never come back up the way you expect (unless you expect some grief). Speaking form experience.

Matt, you're doing great. My electric usage has gone up 200kw a month now that the computer is working in high gear all day and night. Solar panels can no longer keep up. Must get more panels - yummm
JimPea

Great job Matt thanks for the heads up before it happened! There would have been some panicking going on if we wouldn't have known that lol. Got a quick question does the backend stuff have any effect on the pending list at all, as far as the page itself? Noticing the pending page is dropping but not gaining any new units?!Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Really glad to hear that there was no random reboot of synergy this past week. Having built the server myself I was somewhat concerned that perhapse I missed something or there might be some hardware issue. However I'm very confidant in my building abilities as I have been doing this type of work for decades. There is always a margin of error and it did have to be shipped to California from Wisconsin.